Daily Comment on News and Issues of Interest to Michigan Lawyers

Now and Then

03/27/2015

The Michigan Court of Appeals celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

Since its opening, 82 judges have served on the court and it has issued over 151,700 dispositive opinions dealing with many of the most important legal issues ever to have faced Michigan's citizens.

The court invites attorneys who have appeared before it to participate in the celebration by sending reminiscences or commemorations to COA-Fifty@courts.mi.gov. They will include your contribution on their anniversary webpage.

06/13/2014

Did you know that no matter where you travel in Michigan, you are never far from at least one Michigan Legal Milestone plaque?

We encourage you to check out the plaques on your road trips across Michigan this summer. SBM has created a handy interactive Google map of the milestones, with the locations of all of the maps marked on it. Click on the plaque you're interested in visiting and a description of where it is located will pop up for you.

Bonus: If you take a selfie with a plaque, send it to me (SBM Communications Manager Samantha Meinke) at smeinke@mail.michbar.org, and I will share your photo on SBM Blog.

05/29/2014

It was almost 20 years ago to the day that former SBM Executive Director Michael Franck received the first ever Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award from the American Bar Association. He received his award on May 31, 1994 at the Chicago Yacht Club.

On May, 31, 1994, a great man was paid tribute by the legal profession he had nurtured and sustained throughout his life. For his outstanding contributions to the profession, Michael Franck was honored by the American Bar Association with the establishment of the Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award.

On June 28, 1994, Michael Franck passed away leaving a legacy of the law as a high calling, of justice as a defendable right, and of public service as the beacon of a life's work.

For those of us fortunate enough to have been linked with Mike throughout his career, we learned through him that the law was illuminating and empowering and that reform was only one good debate away.

As stated by his colleague Robert Hetlage, past Chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, on the occasion of the establishment of the Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award:

You have done more than any lawyer I have known in my many years of work in the Bar to advance the cause of professional practice, by example, by personal commitment and dedication, by foresight and a remarkable sense of what is right and what works, by sound judgment and leadership, and by pure hard work.

The seeds of Michael Franck's journey as the champion of professional responsibility began in New York City in the early days of professional regulation. For a decade he dominated the scene as the Chief Litigator of the Committee on grievances of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. There he acquired the reputation as tough minded prosecutor and persuasive advocate.

Former SBM president and Berrien County Judge, Al Butzbaugh, presents the State Bar of Michigan Distinguished Public Service Award (since named after Frank Kelley) to Dorothy Comstock Riley, as her husband, another former president of the State Bar of Michigan, Wallace Riley, looks on.

Comstock Riley was the first woman to serve on the Michigan Court of Appeals and the first Hispanic woman to be elected to the supreme court of any state. She served as chief justice from 1987 to 1991.

She is the founder and honorary chair of the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society.

Chin was a Chinese American who was brutally beaten to death with a baseball bat on the night before his wedding. His killers, two white men, who by most accounts were out-of-work automotive workers that mistook Chin for a Japanese person, were sentenced to three years of probation and paid a $3,000 fine. This outraged many people, in particular those in the Asian American community, and is credited with galvanizing the Asian American Civil Rights Movement.

04/17/2014

Meet Octavia Bates, one of the first women lawyers in Michigan, and one of the biggest proponents of women's suffrage.

Bates never practiced law, but she did graduate from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1877 and a Doctor of Laws degree in 1896. The photo above is of her 1896 graduating law school class.

According to the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society, Bates became chair of the Committee on Domestic Relations of the National Council of Women, an organization of over one million members. She was an active member of the Lend-A-Hand Club, the Woman’s Literary Club, the Arundell Club, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Her involvement in the club life of American women led to her appointment by the National Federation of Women’s Clubs as a delegate to the International Council of Women in London in 1899. At the council, Bates delivered a paper entitled “The Study of Law for Women,” which was considered highly progressive at that time. Her reputation even earned her the opportunity to speak with Queen Victoria during an informal afternoon tea about her ideas on the state of American women. Bates traveled extensively, promulgating her views on women’s rights and donating her talents, wealth, and passion to the service of womanhood.

SBM Blog is digging through the State Bar's archives to launch Throw Back Thursdays. We need your help to identify the lawyers in this photo (and many more to come). If you recognize anyone, let us know by leaving us a comment.

12/16/2013

A Florida law firm has filed a challenge in federal court to the Florida Bar rules on attorney advertising as they apply to law firm website contents and blog posts, claiming that the rules are unconstitutionally vague as applied. Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley complain that for decades the Florida Bar has "stood apart from the rest of the nation in the restrictiveness of its rules governing lawyer advertising," but that now, well, they've really just gone too far.

Nothing about the statements singled out by the Bar distinguishes them from statements that thousands of other lawyers routinely include in their advertising—statements that nobody could reasonably claim to be misleading. Indeed, Florida’s rules are so broad that they would have subjected Abraham Lincoln to discipline for stating, in an 1852 newspaper advertisement, that his firm handled business with “promptness and fidelity”—two words that are no more “objectively verifiable” than those the Bar concludes violate its ethics rules here. See American Bar Association, Lawyer Advertising at the Crossroads 32 (1995).